Vizio VIA TVs now have a rich, fully featured Skype application as part of their application suite. Velope worked closely with Maxim IC, Vizio, the Yahoo Connected team, and various SOC vendors to bring what we believe is one of the most exciting applications to your living room.

Skype is proliferating through today’s embedded devices, eliminating the need for a PC or laptop to connect to just about anyone, anywhere, anytime. It’s the biggest thing to happen to television since video on demand.

Unlike early "feature poor" Skype apps for connected TVs, Skpe on Vizio VIA includes 2-way video chat, combination audio/video chat, and traditional text message chat.

Name a better place than a connected HD TV (outside of a movie theater) to view high definition high quality movie trailers and we'll give you $5.

Related Content Database, Inc. (RCDb) tapped Velope as a trusted engineering partner to assist in a development effort to bring Comcast's Fandango movie showtimes & tickets to the Samsung Smart TV applications platform.

Velope used RCDb's Watchwith™ Delivery Platform to quick start development of Fandango for Samsng Smart TV, unlocking the power of the Adobe Stagecraft runtime and resulting in a truly TV-centric, cinematic user experience.

Fandango on Samsung Smart TV users lean back and browse full screen movie trailers, get film details such as synopsis, cast and crew, critic and fan ratings, watch clips and most importantly, get upcoming showtimes from local theaters based on their zip codes.

Vizio looked to Velope to produce and develop its VIA Netflix sidebar application. This nifty Adobe Stagecraft application has served as a solid launch point for a rich Netflix experience on Vizio TVs.

Netflix commissioned Velope for both versions 1 and 2 of this app. These projects presented a unique set of challenges, including working within an emerging Broadcom/Vizio embedded environment, adapting to the Yahoo UI design framework, and overcoming some basic limitations of the Stagecraft (Flash Lite 3.1) runtime. Velope was up for the task.

Kudos to the impressive Netflix UI engineering team. They are the clear global leaders and innovators in multi-device, over-the-top video on demand.

YouTube hired Velope in February 2011 to create the Yahoo Widget Sidebar application and host shell for the YouTube Leanback Lite TV experience.

We quickly developed an Adobe Stagecraft-based application that closely mimicked the Yahoo TV UI look and feel. Our developers then integrated this UI with standard YouTube feeds. Next, we worked closely with the various SOC integrators to make sure the experience was consistent on all 20+ models of the VIA platform.

Now users can quickly browse and choose a YouTube video to play back before leaving their current viewing experience. Once they find something they like, they can launch the full screen experience and view their choice.

Velope subcontracted with Quantox Designs to assist in final revisions and performance optimization of the Stagecraft based Rhapsody application within the Vizio Internet Apps suite.

We worked closely with Adobe to barrel past key performance hurdles that held up final delivery. Our services also lead to a few key UI components for Stagecraft that simplified text entry on Quantox's preexisting recommendations UI engine.

Rhapsody for Vizio Internet Apps was Velope's first Stagecraft based project and one of the first Stagecraft apps to market.

Velope was lucky enough to receive an RFP from Adobe for a next generation proof of concept connected TV application that would be shown at Adobe Max 2010 and CES January 2011. The purpose was to showcase the capabilities the second generation of Adobe's technologies for TV, AIR for TV.

This game leveraged many existing web services such as Google Maps and Yelp to create a full screen full motion cinematic experience where the player "Old Codger" flew around a water bomber plane "Old Bessie" to put out fires in real locations in many cities across the globe.

The user could link their Android based phone and control the game with their phone like a joystick.

Ported and enhanced the user interface for the RCDb reference demo client application. The application leverages the Amazon API portions of the RCDb server to retrieve and display a list of products that then can be selected and purchased.

This is a live demo that actually orders the products. Velope took advantage of the available Flash player in this platform and its powerful graphics and animation capabilities to enhance the user experience with contextual animations and transitions.

Special thanks to the folks at A Different Engine for bringing us on to this development effort. It was Velope's first Roku app and we couldn't have asked for a more exciting and challenging client than North America's largest PPV network. Roku has done a great job providing a UI framework for building VOD applications. This project was a quick success and provided much needed data for the UFC to quickly revise it's approach to maximize ROI in the over the top world.

Sometimes all that matters in the end is the final product making it into the right hands in time. The Superbowl does not wait for ANYONE.

Vizio came to us for a rush job of producing a for broadcast HD motion graphics piece that showcased the CBS Sports application within the Yahoo Widget Framework available on Vizio Connected Televisions. Velope sprung into action, dusted off their After Effects skills and went to work. The challenges in this project were based in the amount of time available and no second chances.

Kudos to CBS, Transpond, A Different Engine, and the video service house that put our work onto tape.

A major cable company OCTO (office of the CTO) contacted Velope in June 2009 with an offer we could not refuse. A highly accomplished VP had sold an internal proof of concept trial project to those that fund these things and it was on.

Velope was solely responsible for the Stagecraft based AS2 UI framework and WDK (widget developer kit). Our job was not only to create a framework for third parties to develop applications for this operator's TV universe, but to create 10+ sample apps for a user experience trial.

Our engineers worked closely with the hardware integrators to create an application platform that could leverage the advantages that a MSO can offer on connected media devices.

Intel, CBS, and Transpond commissioned Velope to create a high definition full motion demonstration piece for the Yahoo Widget Engine available on various Intel based connected media devices. This demo was presented in the context of Intel's 3100/4100 "Canmore" device capabilities.

Velope chose Flash as the interactive multimedia authoring tool given that it could support both high quality, high bitrate, high definition video and large uncompressed graphics assets and still retain smooth user interface transitions and responsiveness.

The challenges of this project were sourcing, compressing, and playing back non-interlaced 1920x1080 video.

Kudos to Intel who shipped us a prototype core I7 box to aid in video compression and allowed us to test our work on the device on which it would be demoed.

France Telecom engaged Velope to assist in creating a new visual design for their Video Genome product as well as the development of the new features that emerged from this exercise.

Velope worked closely with the design team at Momentum Design to shape a complex user experience into a contextual cinematic interaction process. Velope then worked closely with the Orange Labs development team to produce and develop the user interface using Adobe Flex and the Cairngorm micro-architecture.

Velope worked closely with the Comcast User Experience (CUE) to create advanced television feature prototypes.

Over the course of six months Velope delivered eight features that simulated the application behavior of new TV features. CUE used these prototypes for user experience testing, executive demos, and ultimately the specification for development on the target platforms. Velope worked closely with the existing prototype development team to extend and flesh out a prototype development framework.

Velope engaged with Method and Showtime to deliver the Windows Vista premium launch partner application for the Windows Vista Media Center. The application offered Showtime's media catalog in both free and pay per download versions. Users could navigate the entire Showtime lineup and view detailed program information which included cast and character bios, video trailers, and show descriptions. The paid portions included the ability to download series episodes for viewing on a TV or PC.

The challenges of this project were working with five separate tech contributors, beta versions of Vista, and evolving versions of an ecommerce provider service. Kudos to the Showtime team for patience and fortitude to see this project through to launch.

Velope assisted in developing the base UI features for the Mediaroom product. This consisted of the "Guide" application and the DVR feature UI.

The Microsoft Mediaroom software platform powers the cloud for TV and video service providers to deliver the best in entertainment experiences across all the screens in their subscribers' lives.

Microsoft licenses this platform to TV and video service providers so they can deliver world-class TV and video services along with enhanced content and applications, across TV’s, PC’s, and mobile devices- anytime and anywhere, both inside and outside the home.

As a research project for a consortium of cable networks, Velope worked closely with Viewfarm to provide TV feature prototypes. Our shared role was to escort our clients through the first two steps of the UI design process, customer research and invention. Prototypes were created for user experience testing as well as executive level demos.

Prior to developing complex applications for set top box software platforms, Microsoft insured they had their features well worked out. This was accomplished through iterating both visual designs and application flows and tested with feature prototypes developed using Adobe Flash.

The TV2 team had a full blown "Living Room" test lab where users were provided a comfortable simulated TV viewing experience and asked to use TV features such as the program guide, DVR, and VOD. Feedback helped refine these features before they were finalized for final development on the target devices.

Velope assisted in both Flash feature development as well as sourcing IR hardware and integrating remotes and receivers to simulate a true TV viewing experience.

Velope Inc. worked closely with Stimulant.io to bring Twine.com's semantic web database into a contextual visual paradigm.

This Flash 10 based application utilized the new 3D capabilities of the Flash 10 player to add a high impact and meaningful visual relationship to the Twine semantic web database. The project started as a prototype for studying advanced data visualization and evolved into a production piece over the course of a few iterations.